


Departure

by VesperRegina



Category: Galileo (TV Japan)
Genre: 30kisses, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 20:10:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VesperRegina/pseuds/VesperRegina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's only a sabbatical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Departure

**Author's Note:**

> For the 30Kisses prompt: 余計な鎖, "extra chain." Inspired by Sierra DeMulder's poem, "Facts Written From an Airplane." Non-chronological, slightly AU.

1.  
He pulls on her hair, wrapped around his hand, a tight coil, forces her head back, and she gasps. It's enough, and it's all, and he strokes his hand through it later, cradles her to his chest, and she makes a silent promise that she'll never cut it short.

2.  
She's not ignorant that his most genuine smiles are reserved, not for her, but for another, someone dearer, someone who has had more time to be called his friend. Whatever affection he gives is unnamed, but it burns incandescent to anyone who has the eyes to see it. So she closes her eyes in the dark, afterimages on the insides of her eyelids, destructive and bright, because they promise peace unfulfilled, love spoken, happiness evident in a smile that is not for her. She can't have it, can't ask for it, can't make it happen, so she bites her lip hard enough to taste iron and keeps that person's name inside, where it cannot hurt them both.

3.  
She makes faces behind his back and calls herself childish. She argues with his viewpoints about love, about marriage, and she silences herself when he does not bend. She makes up insults when he tells her to be quiet and refuses to answer the phone when she sees his name in the list. 

She drinks until her world starts to tilt, but it's not enough to make her forget and just enough to make her foolish, and she bangs on his door at two in the morning, and she pokes her finger in his chest and tells him that she's not a child, so don't treat her like one, and she kisses him, once, and says, "See, see!"

She wobbles when she turns, but she pushes his hand away when it closes on her elbow. She protests that she can take care of herself, and then the hallway swims down into darkness, and when she opens her eyes, he's holding her head in his lap, and his hand is on her face. He says nothing when she starts to cry and swear, voice cracking with anger and exhaustion, and her tears are hot on her palms as she swipes them away and they stay there, outside his door, and neither of them bother to raise themselves from the floor.

His fingers ghost over the corner of her eyebrow, her eyelashes, and his thumb wipes the trail of a tear away, and she closes her eyes, pushes herself up and folds herself in, hiding her face, and says, "Don't you dare hurt me." 

She doesn't protest when he places his hand on her shoulder, fingertips pressing, cautious, careful, into the hard jut of her collarbone. She doesn't move, doesn't respond, when he says, "And yet I already have, haven't I?"

4.  
She slips into the back of his class, pulling her coat around her, crossing her legs at the ankles, and she pretends to sleep, puts her head down on her arms, and listens to his voice, listens to it expound on facts and figures and when he stops before her, after everyone else, all those girls, leave, whispering and rustling, and she keeps her eyes closed all through that, but when he calls her name, she stretches up, arms over her head, her coat gaping, showing far too much skin, and she smiles up at him, and laughs when he frowns, and then laughs again when he pushes her down over the table in his lab, puts his hand between her legs, and she gasps out, Professor, oh sensei, sensei, you should fail me.

5.  
Her mother asks her when she's going to get married. Her mother asks her when she's decided to have children. Her mother tells her to just bring around her boyfriend, even, to let her play host. Her mother asks about the nice professor, and it's there that she raises her hands, and says that he's just a friend, just a consultant, just a man, and she looks down and keeps a series of qualifiers to herself -- a man she is not sleeping with, a man who doesn't love her, professes not to understand the concept, and cannot give her children because he fears them, irrationally and unforgivably.

Her mother looks at her like she can see the excuses revealed, a message written with lemon juice growing dark under heat, but all she does is nod and push a cup of tea to her daughter, and say that she looks like she's lost weight and needs sleep.

Her mother carefully ignores her daughter's lies, and lets her drink her tea, quiet and withdrawn.

6.  
She waits until the last few days before she leaves to tell him she's going. Six years, and she's never been able to get the right words out, vapor and smoke and light and heat, always matter but never substance. She starts letters in the gaps between cases, lists of ways they fed each other like fire and oxygen, but his inspiration and his presence and his warmth against her skin, were always fleeting.

When the dreams start, when she understands that she was -- is -- depressed, when she starts researching statistics on suicide, when she understands that she has to get out before she's one of those statistics, the time to tell him all those words is over and done with.

He wouldn't understand.

7.  
She wanted it to be different and though the opportunity came in an unexpected way, she got out, taking what was good, what was memorable, taking the pain and the pleasure with her. A year, she tells herself, and she can return, and he'll be unchanged, and she'll come back to his lab, surprise him after a class, and ask -- not if he missed her, not if he received her presents -- no, she'll ask none of those things. She'll return and she'll ask if he'll make her a cup of coffee and then she'll put her head down on the table and tell him that the heat in Oklahoma is just like that in Japan, but that the humidity made her feel like she was drowning. She makes an oath to herself to ask him if he missed her.

8.  
She left Japan, left it behind because it was barren, and she was exhausted, tired of screaming into air, depleting the oxygen from an atmosphere already gone thin. And when she started to choke on tears, because all she had now was a rock and the memory, finally, of a smile made for her only, finally genuine and loving, when the tears filled her throat, trying to break through the dam she'd built to keep them from spilling out her eyes, she swallowed them down, stared out the tiny window with eyes that were blinking, blinking, blinking, the sky outside blurring into a slurry of white and blue. She thought about tornadoes and safety, and how this decision, this escape, was as wide as the horizon.


End file.
